Thoughts and Thinking

What influences our thoughts?

I can’t count how many times and in how many places I’ve read that we must “control our thoughts.” From conservative Catholic practical theology books and articles all the way down the spectrum to new-agey self-help writings. Control your thoughts. Well and good, I understand the point. What I don’t understand, though, is how to do it.

Sure, they’ll tell you it’s a hard thing to do. Perhaps the hardest thing we’re called to do on a daily, almost minute-by-minute basis during our sabbatical in this world. But if we are to get anything done while we’re here, and have a fair degree of peace of mind while we’re doing it, we need to control what the old noggin is focusing on. So I decided to practice what they preach and control my thinking for an hour, and concentrate on the opening question to this post.

I figure if we knew what exactly influences our thoughts we’d have a leg up on controlling them. Makes sense, right? And once we knew the influencers of thought, we could come up with some solutions, some things we can implement so that our negativity never rises above a certain point, and, if it does, it can quickly be brought down and replaced with better, nobler thinking.

There seems to be three main forces that influence what will cross our mind at any given instant in time.

The first is your physiology. This is the body part of the mind-body dualistic equation. In a nutshell, it’s the way you feel at this moment. Are you tired? Energetic? Happy? Sad? Mellow? Excited? Your physiology has a lot to do with that. It’s basically the result of four things: your diet, the frequency and quality of your exercising, the frequency and quality of your rest and relaxation, and your habitual posture. Yeah, you know about diet and exercise, as well as sleep, but now you know posture plays an important role. Don’t believe me? Next time you feel dragging, take a deep breath and stand as if an invisible cable were attached to your head and was pulling you up to the ceiling. You’ll instantly feel better. Why do they teach recruits in the armed forces to stand up straight with chest out?

The next part is external stimuli. This is the people, the environment, and the events that are immediately about you. This is kind of obvious. I mean, compare what would go through your mind sitting in an empty church as opposed to standing in the middle of Times Square on New Years Eve. This is also why being around habitually negative people is such a contagion for sensitive people like myself.

The last influencer, I believe, is your history of thinking. What you’ve thought in various situations over your lifetime, whether it was deliberately taught or unconsciously developed as, say, a defense mechanism. Think of a tree as symbolic of your thinking. Early on, it’s just a little stalk. But as time goes on, as water and nutrients are brought into the stalk, hard bark is formed, layer by layer, continually re-covering itself, until eventually a thick tree trunk results. Same with your thinking. There some external stimuli, your in a certain state of physiology, and you respond by thinking a certain thought. You get rewarded in some way, and the little stalk begins to grow. After a couple of years of such thinking, after a trunk of habitual thought results, don’t you see how difficult it would be to change?

Now, what’s the solution?

Simply, this:

1. Maintain excellent physiology
2. Associate with positive people who demonstrate the qualities you wish to have
3. Control your environment as favorably as possible to the best of your ability
4. Control events as favorably as possible to the best of your ability
5. Change your habitual thinking

Sounds easy, right? Now go out and do it! But wait – number 5, “Change your habitual thinking” … that’s still just a restatement of the phrase “Control your thoughts.” Hmmm. After some thought devoted to that thought, I decided there’s no pat answer to that one. Yes, improving your physiology will improve the quality of your thoughts. Yes, changing your environment and the people you surround yourself with will improve your thoughts. Yes, a little forward thinking about what may happen given this or that circumstances (“contingency planning”) will improve the quality of your thoughts. But how the heck do you deal with a lifetime of bad habitual useless and self-destructive thinking?

For me I had to go back to the drawing board and spend another hour brainstorming. I came up with a list of twenty-eight items. Some were concrete actions I had to take, some were replacement habits I should work on, some were techniques I could use to interrupt when habitual thinking kicked in. It looked like a lot of work, but if I could implement one thing every two weeks, and do it diligently, in a year I’d be a better person.

Right?

Well, I did these two brainstorming sessions a little over three years ago. I did devote considerable effort towards this problem (realizing it would spill over into all areas of my life, resulting in overall improvement and satisfaction). There were also months and months were I simply forgot everything I just wrote. All in all, I’d say, honestly, I’m about 35 to 40 percent of the way there. Recently I’ve been putting heavy focus on physiology – I had my heart issue taken care of, I’m on the raw foods transitional diet, drinking plenty of water, stretching daily, and a bunch of other things. Other aspects, such as environment, are in dire need of revision, and they will be revised, soon.

The only way to do it is to chip away at yourself, chiseling a bit here and there, resting and resuming, and eventually, over the course of a lifetime, you might actually be happy with the results.